Kafka - The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics) - A new translation by Joyce Crick

Franz Kafka

Oxford University Press

2009

158 páginas

5h 16m

ISBN-13: 9780199238552

With a bewildering blend of the everyday and the fantastical, Kafka thus begins his most famous short story, The Metamorphosis. A commercial traveller is unexpectedly freed from his dreary job by his inexplicable transformation into an insect, which drastically alters his relationship with his family. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called punishments. The judgment also concerns family tensions, when a power struggle between father and son ends with the father passing an enigmatic judgment on the helpless son. The third story, In The Penal Colony, explores questions of power, justice, punishment, and meaning of pain played out in a colonial setting.

These three stories are flanked by two very different works. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poingnant mood-pictures, while in the autobiographical Letter to his Father, Kafka analyses his difficult relationship in devastating forensic detail.